1. Field
The present disclosure relates to optical communication equipment and, more specifically but not exclusively, to scheduling packet transmissions in an optical network having a mesh topology.
2. Description of the Related Art
This section introduces aspects that may help facilitate a better understanding of the invention(s). Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
Optical burst switching and related optical packet-switching technologies can be implemented using an optical network having nodes equipped with wavelength-tunable transmitters, wavelength-tunable receivers, and wavelength-selective switches. To implement efficient packet-transmission scheduling in such an optical network, the network controller needs to assign slots in the time/wavelength plane to node-to-node connections in a manner that satisfies the traffic demand and, if necessary, causes the achieved data throughput to be relatively close to the maximum theoretical throughput. However, in an optical network having a generic mesh topology, this type of scheduling is relatively difficult to realize, for example, because, in contrast to a clocked packet switch, a packet-switched network exhibits randomly different delays for any pair of ingress/egress nodes.